Q2 2010 Witnessed 540 Million Infection Attempts

Kaspersky Lab, A leading vendor of secure content management solutions, has released its report on information security threats for Q2 2010. According to the report, during the period, over 540 Million attempts to corrupt computers across the globe were detected.

The counteracted figure was totaled at 157,626,761. Located in various countries, these attacks stemmed from a range of Internet resources.

There was a slight increase of 0.7% in the percentage of exploits in the total figure of malicious programs with 8,540,223 exploits detected during Q1 2010. Vulnerabilities in Adobe programs targeted by exploits continued to dominate, but its share decreased by 17% compared to Q1 2010.

Users' computers tracked with a total figure of 33,765,504 unpatched vulnerabilities, while 203,997,565 malicious programs were blocked and neutralized on users' systems.

Most of the attacks targeted China (17.09% of all attacks), Russia (11.36%), India (9.30%), the USA (5.96%) and Vietnam (5.44%). When it comes to the share in the total number of infection, the most visible changes were displayed by Vietnam (+1.71%) and Russia (-1.82%).

On the whole, over 33 Million vulnerable files and applications were identified on users' systems during Q2 2010. Out of every four computers, one computer was found to have over seven unpatched flaws.

Most of the Internet attacks initiate with exploits which make it easy for cyber crooks to secretly get access to systems and download malware to infect the computers. Therefore, it is not a surprise that the cost of exploit packages in the region is of thousands of dollars.

One of the traditional methods to infect the systems is targeting vulnerabilities in commonly used programs and services. Machines are infected by targeting vulnerabilities with the specially crafted code - exploits- making the work of hacker automated. During the reporting period, eight and half million exploits were detected with the most common being malware which targets Adobe Reader's vulnerabilities.

Another interesting trend seen in Q2 2010 was the capability to develop and run botnets through Twitter accounts. On an account page, cyber crooks succeeded to publish botnet commands in the text form. Luckily, Twitter administrators recognized the problem quickly and succeeded to deactivate all malicious accounts.